There were other problems. At Godhavn, Greenland, the expedition’s remaining four men had been taken aboard – two Eskimo dog drivers, Jens Edward and Frederick Christiansen, and two civilian volunteers, Henry Clay (grandson of the great Kentucky orator) and a surgeon, Dr. Octave Pavy. Pavy was the problem. He and Clay quarrelled so viciously that one would have to go. Greely, who could not spare the doctor, agreed that Clay would return with the Proteus. Clay made the ship that Kislingbury missed.
Pavy was not an easy man to deal with. Mercurial, often moody, ambitious, this high-domed, pipe-smoking scientist felt himself superior to the others – as Dr. Bessels had on the Hall voyage. There was no doubt in his mind that he would make a better leader of the expedition than Greely. Technically, he was now a soldier, but he considered himself above military discipline; and there was little that Greely could do about that. As scientific leader of the expedition and its only doctor, Pavy was immune.
Except for his interest in polar exploration, which was obsessive, Pavy had very little in common with his commander. In fact, it would have been difficult to discover two more disparate characters. The strait-laced Greely didn’t like him, was suspicious of his motives, and referred to him as a “Bohemian,” a word that, in Greely’s puritan lexicon, carried connotations of the devil.
Pavy’s background was both romantic and bizarre. The son of a wealthy French plantation owner and cotton merchant in New Orleans, he had been educated in Paris, where he studied both science and medicine. He had travelled widely in Europe – French was his first language – and considered himself a connoisseur of painting and sculpture. But the virus was in him, too: the Arctic captivated him; the mystery of the Pole magnetized him. In his early twenties he had encountered the French explorer Gustav Lambert and planned with him a polar expedition that was aborted only by the onset of the Franco-Prussian War. Pavy fought with distinction as a captain in the Black Guerrillas. But his Arctic hopes were dashed when Lambert was killed.
Back in the United States, Pavy had fallen under the spell of Charles Francis Hall, with whom he held daily conversations. When Hall headed north on his government-sponsored expedition, Pavy sought to out-do him with a private one. Like De Long, he was convinced that the proper route to the Pole led through the Bering Sea, and so the “Pavy Expedition to the North Pole” was born in San Francisco. In a weird turn of fortune, the chief financial backer was murdered by his valet just before the expedition was to sail in the summer of 1872. Pavy was given the news while attending a fashionable ball. It changed his life.
For the next four years, sunk in despondency, the thwarted explorer became a vagabond, living along the banks of the Missouri River – a ragged, threadbare, and friendless wanderer, working at a series of menial jobs until he was taken up by two Missouri physicians. Suddenly, he was back in society, completing his medical studies, marrying into a well-to-do family, and lecturing at the St. Louis Academy of Science. In 1880 he headed for the Arctic. The following year, at Godhavn, he boarded the Proteus and became part of the Greely expedition.
There is something splendidly ironic about Pavy’s connection with the International Polar Year. The Greely expedition, following Karl Weyprecht’s philosophy, was supposed to be devoted entirely to scientific observation; the romantic idea of a “race to the Pole” had no part in its conception. Yet the scientist placed in charge at Lady Franklin Bay was less interested in meticulous observation than he was in the adventure of polar discovery. Octave Pierre Pavy was determined to get as close to the Pole as possible – and to beat out any possible rival, including the members of his own expedition.
Greely was by no means immune to a similar ambition. At the very least, he wanted to push one party farther north than Markham of the Nares party had gone five years before. That fall he sent out two parties under Lockwood and Pavy to scout the land and set up depots for the spring sledging. He had already picked Lockwood – a tireless worker in spite of his problems at early morning rising – to try to beat the British record. But Pavy was determined to forestall him. That October, while on a sledging trip with Jens, the cheerful Eskimo dog driver, he revealed his plan to young Private William Whisler, his sledgemate. He promised he’d take Whisler with him in the spring to try to reach the highest northern latitude yet attained. He would manage this by having Whisler steal the expedition’s only remaining dogteam. Without dogs, Lockwood wouldn’t be able to travel as far, and Pavy would grab the glory. When Whisler refused, Pavy became abusive and angry. Whisler threatened him with a revolver, and there the matter ended. Whisler kept the plot to himself and didn’t reveal it to Greely until both were on the point of death. Pavy and Whisler had attempted to reach Cape Joseph Henry on Ellesmere’s northern coast but couldn’t reach it. Nor did they find any traces of the missing Jeannette.
For 136 days, from mid-October 1881 to the end of February 1882, the twenty-five men closeted in the small hut they named Fort Conger were without the sun. Marooned on those bleak and treeless shores, hemmed in by sullen, wall-like cliffs that rose as high as a thousand feet, they did their best to pass the time playing Parcheesi and chess, backgammon and cards (but never for money), engaging in theatricals, taking classes in everything from grammar to meteorology, and publishing a newspaper, the Arctic Moon. Greely himself lectured on “the Arctic question,” a euphemism for the North Pole discovery, which, as George Rice, the civilian photographer who had been given sergeant’s rank, remarked, was “a subject especially absorbing to those present.”
The four officers lived precariously, crammed together into a fifteen-by-seventeen-foot space and separated from the enlisted men by an entry alcove and a kitchen. The mordant Pavy, who felt confined “like a white bear in its cage,” had gravitated toward the equally sarcastic Kislingbury; they shared a common distaste for Greely, whose “indomitable vanity” (Pavy’s words) and rigid discipline continued to chafe.
To the restless young James Lockwood, eager to be off on his northern quest, the months seemed to stretch off endlessly. “Surely this is a happy quartet occupying this room!” he wrote sardonically in his journal that fall. “We often sit silent during the whole day and even a meal fails to elicit anything more than a chance remark or two. A charming prospect for four months of darkness penned up as we are.…”
Greely at Fort Conger, 1881-83
Lockwood longed for relief, but there was none. They had arrived in the High Arctic to experience the coldest winter on record. The enlisted men became depressed, growling over the least imagined slight. Pavy noted sourly that “they say and express loudly that they came here only to make a stake. That they have no desire and interest to make discoveries and that if they could return next year, they will do so.”
On December 5, Jens, the Eskimo dog driver – a great favourite – ran away, apparently prepared to die from starvation or suicide. A search party found him, sullen and stubborn, and convinced him that no one had intended to wrong him. Two days later, his companion, Frederick, armed with a large wooden cross, presented himself to the officers, claiming that the men were going to shoot him. He announced that he was going away to die and was restrained only with difficulty. Small wonder that Sergeant David Brainard, when he finally located Charles Hall’s grave at Polaris Bay – an equally desolate prospect – sounded a wan note in his diary. “One scarcely wonders that Hall died,” he wrote. “I think the gloom would drive me to suicide in a week.” That night Brainard kept his spirits up with some of Lockwood’s rum punch.
Late in April 1882, Greely dispatched his two main expeditions to try to better the British record of Farthest North. Pavy would take one party up the coast of Ellesmere Island, following it to Cape Joseph Henry, its northern tip, to try to beat Markham’s record. Lockwood would take a second across Robeson Channel to the Greenland coast and then north in Beaumont’s tracks.
Pavy had the bad luck to encounter open water. He returned empty handed and, if the letters Greely wrote to his wife in the expectation of a rel
ief ship are to be believed, more surly than ever. Greely had already written that the doctor was “an arrant mischief maker.” Now he described him to Henrietta Greely as a “tricky double-faced man, idle, unfit for any Arctic work except doctoring & sledge travel & not first class in the latter.” Pavy and Kislingbury were now spending most of their time together, “united by the common wish and desire to break down the commander but not daring to openly act to that effect.”
Greely’s hope lay in Lockwood, who was facing harsh conditions in his attempts to better the British record. Within a week, four of his men had broken down and been sent back to Fort Conger. Brainard, his second-in-command, described the blowing snow as “like handfuls of gravel thrown in our faces.” On April 29, on the northern coast of Greenland, with Cape Britannia in the distance, Lockwood sent all but two of his men back, three to wait at the Polaris boat camp, the others to return to the ship. Fred, the dog driver, was indispensable, and Brainard, in spite of snowblindness, was still the strongest and most steadfast of the group. This pair would accompany him on the final dash to break the record.
At twenty-four, Sergeant Brainard – blue-eyed, firm-jawed, and handsome – had already seen five years of service with the 2nd Cavalry. He had joined the Army at nineteen on an impulse, having left his home in Norway to visit the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Changing trains on the way back to New York, he found he’d lost the money he’d been keeping to buy a ticket home. He was too proud to write for help; instead, he took the free ferry to Governor’s Island and signed up. Wounded in the Indian wars in the West, he’d been ready to return to civilian life when the Arctic beckoned. Here he proved his mettle. Greely called him “my mainstay in many things,” and so, in the dark days that followed, he would prove to be. David Brainard was all soldier. Others in that strangely assorted company might whine, grumble, and plot; not he.
In his own words, he “stumbled about all day like a blind man,” his eyes smarting from the glare as if scoured by red-hot sand. In spite of that, the party made good time. On May 4, at four-thirty in the morning, the bulk of Cape Britannia loomed out of the haze. Beaumont had seen it, but, wracked by scurvy, had never reached it. The two Americans and their Eskimo driver, sucking on lemon-juice lozenges, arrived at its base at seven-thirty that evening and unfurled a small American flag to mark their triumph.
They pressed on for another ten days until their supplies ran out. At latitude 83° 24′ N they built “a magnificent cairn which will endure for ages” and planted another Stars and Stripes on the spot. For the first time in three centuries, it was a non-British expedition that had reached the highest explored latitude on the globe, and Brainard was determined to mark it in a uniquely American way. Everywhere he had travelled, he noted, he had always seen a malt liquor called Plantation Bitters advertised conspicuously. Nothing would do but that he climb the face of a volcanic cliff and carve out the company’s familiar trademark: St 1860 X (“Started trade in 1860 with ten dollars”). That done, it was time to head for home.
They had managed to get one hundred nautical miles farther north than Beaumont but only four miles farther than Markham. Nonetheless, the record stood for thirteen years. They had also charted eighty-five miles of unexplored Greenland coastline. On the return journey they came upon one of Beaumont’s cairns containing a message detailing the onset of scurvy, from which, thanks to an improved diet and the lemon-juice lozenges, they were happily free. But two of the support party had been so badly blinded by the glare that they had to be led back by the hand to Fort Conger. They reached it on June 11.
Lockwood’s victory did not sit well with the jealous Dr. Pavy, who was so persistently rude and hostile to him that Lockwood pleaded with Greely not to send the two out together the following spring. Greely refused. Scientific observations, he said, had to take precedence over personal failings. Greely himself set out that summer to explore the interior of Grinnell Land, as the mid-section of Ellesmere Island was called, seeking if possible to find a route through that fiord-riven domain to the “Western Sea” – in short another North West Passage. In this he was unsuccessful, but he did unlock many of the secrets of Ellesmere’s mountainous interior – a country so rugged that when he and his men returned, their bleeding toes protruded from what was left of their tattered boots.
By August 1882, the party began to look forward to the arrival of the supply ship from the south, bringing new provisions, new personnel, and, far more important, mail and news from home. Days passed; nothing. Yet the harbour was relatively clear of ice, more open than it had been the previous year. Greely could not know that the ship, the Neptune, was two hundred miles to the south, vainly striving to force its way through a frozen barrier that could not be breached.
As hopes began to fade, the company was faced with the dismaying prospect of a second winter cut off from civilization. “The life we are leading now is somewhat similar to a prisoner in the Bastile [sic]” the impatient Lockwood wrote, “no amusements, no recreations, no event to break the monotony.… The others are as moody as I am – Greely sometimes, Kislingbury always, and as to the doctor, to say he is not congenial is to put it in a very mild way indeed.” On the other hand, “the hilarity in the other room is in marked contrast to the gloom in this.”
By late fall, with no hope of relief, the mood grew even darker. Sergeant William Cross, the glowering, black-bearded former machinist who had charge of the expedition’s motor launch, Lady Greely, got drunk on spirit-lamp fuel pilfered from the little vessel and tumbled, senseless, into the icy waters of the harbour. Brainard pulled him out and because, like Pavy, he was indispensable, Greely treated him leniently. When Greely wasn’t present Kislingbury and Pavy engaged in what Lockwood called “the most gloomy prognostications as to the future, and in adverse criticisms on the conduct of the expedition.” Sometimes, Lockwood thought, the life of an exile in Siberia would be preferable. The only reading available consisted of novels and books on the Arctic. Lockwood, in studying these, became convinced, as did others, that Isaac Hayes had exaggerated his own exploits. He could not, for instance, have come anywhere near Cape Lieber as he claimed. To reach that farthest point he would have had to travel ninety-six miles in fourteen hours, a clear impossibility.
The monotonous winter dragged on. Because of the danger from polar bears the men were ordered to stay within five hundred feet of the hut, a restriction that made exercise boring. Brainard noticed the “state of nervousness our idleness has brought on all of us.” The smallest things caused aggravation and annoyance. To combat lassitude Greely had forbidden the men to sleep in their bunks during the day. The Christmas celebration, Brainard noted, was a mockery. No other expedition had spent a second winter this far north; no other had experienced nights longer or darker than these. On New Year’s Eve, there was barely enough spirit left to get up a dance. Fred, the Eskimo driver, was the star of the evening, dancing a hornpipe that at last brought a few chuckles from the downcast assembly.
Lockwood was in a frenzy to be off to reach the 84th parallel and set a new record. He left on March 2, 1883, with a party that again included Brainard and Frederick, his comrades on the previous journey. This time they failed. The polar pack, which had the year before allowed the sledges to make shortcuts across the frozen inlets, was breaking up early. The party barely escaped drowning when the dogs crashed through the thin ice near Repulse Haven on Greenland’s north shore. Lockwood wanted to keep on, but Greely’s orders had been explicit: if the pack started to break up he was to return at once and not endanger human life. Brainard told him he had no choice. They arrived back at Fort Conger on April 11, 1883.
Lockwood was grievously disappointed. “Do I take up my pen to write the humiliating word failed?” he wrote. “I do, and bitter is the dose.…” He was eager to go out again – anything to get away from the morose Pavy and the gloomy Kislingbury – and so proposed a new scheme that, he insisted, would see him exceed his previous record and still be back within forty-f
our days. Greely quashed it; it wasn’t prudent, he told Lockwood.
Lockwood promptly came up with an alternative plan – to go west along the north shore of Grinnell Land and then north to surpass the English again in new discoveries. This time Greely agreed. The romantic idea of an international race of discovery – the very kind of geographical contest that Karl Weyprecht had deprecated and this expedition was supposed to eschew – now seemed uppermost in everybody’s mind. Lockwood took Brainard and Frederick with him again; there was no more talk of Pavy travelling with him that spring. They set off on April 25, and this time their explorations bore fruit.
While the others continued with the ambitious scientific program the trio charted more of the interior of Grinnell Land. They discovered the vast Agassiz Glacier, which sprawls for eighty-five square miles over the heart of Ellesmere Island. They crossed the divide to the “Western Ocean” – a long fiord that led, not to the open sea, but to a tangle of islands off Ellesmere’s western coast. On their return they came upon an unexpected sight: another of those strange fossil forests that are scattered across the face of the Arctic – trees nine inches thick, turned to stone, that hint at a temperate northern world before the ice ages.
Lockwood, Brainard, and Frederick had achieved for the Greely expedition three new records: a Farthest North, a Farthest East, and a Farthest West – records the British had held for three centuries. They had travelled by foot and dogsled a distance equal to one-eighth of the world’s circumference at the eightieth parallel. Geographical exploration and national sentiment had again taken precedence over scientific observation. That became painfully clear when Greely discovered that Dr. Pavy’s own collections were in a shambles. The doctor was far more interested in scoring geographical firsts than he was in keeping a systematic scientific record. He had deceived Greely, claiming that his specimens were properly preserved and that he’d kept careful notes. He had not. The “collection” was a vast jumble of artifacts, skins, pressed flowers, and rocks. Greely fired Pavy as scientific leader and appointed Lockwood, who had no training, to bring order out of chaos. In the end it didn’t matter. The specimens, which Lockwood arranged, noted, and carefully packed, had to be abandoned.
The Arctic Grail Page 51